MATCHMAKING
EXCERPT FROM EUROTRIPPING ©JR DAESCHNER
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Welcome to Lisdoonvarna!That's what the expat from Boston thinks as she wedges herself into the pub. A corporate jet-setter based in Ireland, she doesn't have much time to meet men, and given that she's on the far side of thirty, time may be running out. |
Not that she's looking, of course.
She's just here for a good time-the craic, as the Irish call it.
Then again, you never know-it could be like that Hollywood movie, the one where a wisecracking Yank falls for an Irish charmer: dark, handsome and presumably hung like a donkey (never mind what they say about the Irish Curse).
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Sure enough, the moment our Bostonian sets foot in The Matchmaker, she's hit with her first chat-up line of the evening:
'Yer boobs-are they real?' Welcome to Lisdoonvarna! A Lourdes of Love for romantics; for others, a Guinness-fuelled den of iniquity, a 'culchie' Sodom and Gomorrah, a country-and-western rutfest stuck way out in the far west of Ireland-the very edge of EuropeÑjust a few miles from the Cliffs of Moher, where Hibernia plunges into the sea, resurfacing again to form the Aran Islands. |
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Like Connemara to the north, County Clare is about as Irish as modern Ireland gets, one of the last vestiges of 'real Ireland' (whatever that is), where a former spa town continues a custom once widespread throughout the country and the Continent: matchmaking.
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